A Model-Driven SOA Implementation of Multi-Channel Websphere

Commerce Gift Center

Yew-Huey Liu, Jih-Shyr Yih, Florian Pinel and Trieu Chieu

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

P.O. Box 704,

Yorktown Heights, NY 10598

{tchieu, yhliu, pinel, jyih}@us.ibm.com

Abstract

This multi-channel commerce gift registry solution

is a design using a Service-Oriented Architecture for

real-time communication amongst a central web

application server, store branches and telesales

centers. Product information, promotions, order

entries, and services are fully integrated across sales

channels and customer touch points, such as web

browsers, telephones, store kiosks, wireless shopping

buddies, and scanners. This solution was developed by

a model-driven approach, which begins with modeling

of business processes of how shoppers can be enabled

from gift ideas to coordinated gift givings, during

which each is possibly working with a different

channel and at different stores. The solution has

helped create the Websphere Commerce Gift Center as

a leadership product offering, recognized by the

Gartner Magic Quadrant for e-Commerce in 2007.

Keywords: Websphere commerce, gift registry,

model-driven, business process, SOA, multi-channel,

pervasive computing, collaborative shopping.

1. Introduction

As the trend of on-line shopping increases,

significant portions of transactions are still being done

in the traditional in-store environment or over the

phone calls. All these commerce channels will

continue to exist, because existing consumers’

shopping patterns will not change easily. Moreover,

stores have incorporated gadgets to enrich and facilitate

customers’ in-store shopping experience. The

challenge would be how can retailers integrate these

available commerce channels to deliver consistent

shopping experience and personalized information at

shoppers’ various touch points such as web browsers,

telephones, store kiosks, wireless shopping buddies,

and scanners. From reports of early multi-channel

commerce experiments, it is found that store sales

increases and telesales productivity improves [1, 2].

For instance, consumers who walk into a store after

researching products on the web, tend to make

additional purchases. Likewise, informed shoppers

take up less time of the telesales staff.

Retailers, whether web-based or traditional, have

realized that developing a successful multi-channel

strategy is more important than offering low prices in

order to keep up with the dynamics of retailing. A

multi-channel strategy lets companies and customers

take advantage of the strength of the different channels.

It can also help companies build better and stronger

relationship with their customers and get a better

understanding of the customers’ buying behavior.

With the introduction of pervasive wireless devices,

they give users the ability to augment the physical

environment, with digital information and resources

[3,4]. The wireless connection allows shoppers to

combine the benefits of shopping in real stores with

those of on-line shopping [5]. Figure 1, shows a

possible configuration of the commerce channels with

some typical touch points.

IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering

978-0-7695-3395-7/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/ICEBE.2008.96

29

IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering

978-0-7695-3395-7/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/ICEBE.2008.96

29

Figure 1. Web and in-store commerce in a multi-

channel environment

In this paper, we demonstrate how a commerce

business model, commonly knows as gift registry, can

be constructed using such distributed multi-channel

commerce servers. In Section 2, we model the practice

of gift registry in terms of business processes, which

serve as the basis for driving the solution development.

In Section 3, we discuss the use of Service-Oriented-

Architecture for a multi-channel gift registry solution.

In Section 4, we present a number of gift registry use

case scenarios, and interactions between users playing

different roles. Finally, our concluding remarks for the

study are given in Section 5.

Headquarter

Contact Center Specialist

Sales

Browser

Kiosk w/ scanner

POS device

Hom

CRM Data Warehouse

ERP

Web

Commerce

Server

In-store

server

Internet

Figure 2. Gift registry business process.

3030

2. Gift Registry Business Processes

Before internet-enabled gift registries, customers

need to fill out forms while at the store. Registrants

most likely use catalogs and sales associates to select

the gifts they wanted. With a web channel enabled gift

registry, a registrant could create a personalized gift list

and browse the inventory at the comfort of his or her

house. Likewise, gift givers can find and access the on-

line gift registry to buy presents over the web.

However, if a gift giver wants to pick up the gift from a

physical store, they need to print out the gift registry

list from the web and bring the list to the store. The list

would show the remaining gifts to be checked. But,

this gift giver can still cause duplications or unwanted

gifts, because the printout does not keep up with the

registrants and other guests’ further actions.

In Figure 2, we illustrate a set of business process

for a coordinated gift registry shopping, using the IBM

Websphere Business Modeler [6]. The process shows

the hosts of a party may independently work out a

common list of gift ideas for their guests to shop

accordingly, all in a coordinated fashion.

IBM WebSphere Commerce software is designed to

help businesses that want to:

• Deploy their first serious e-commerce site to reach

new customers and markets, and to better serve existing

customers.

• Replace an outdated or failing e-commerce site or

consolidate all of their customer-facing sites and e-

commerce initiatives on a single platform.

• Establish the foundation for a multi-channel

strategy, integrating all of the channels and touch

points they use to do business with their customers

(Web, store, call center and so on).

• Automate unique, complex business to-business

(B2B) contractual agreements and business

relationships online.

• Better serve downstream channel partners and

enable them to better serve their customers.

An SOA based solution can improve business

performance and provide flexibility to meet business

needs. With IBM WebSphere Commerce Gift Center

Solution [7], client can choose from three readily

available reference deployments with user interfaces

for an online Web site, an in-store kiosk with handheld

scanners and an in-store gift consultant to illustrate how

to create and manage a gift registry. However, these

applications are not mutually exclusive — they work

together to provide the kind of multi-channel gift-

registry solution IBM clients expect from a WebSphere

Commerce solution. Gift givers are provided the same

convenience as registrants. They too can access the gift

registry by following a link provided in an e-mail sent

by the registrant, directly from your store web site,

through your in-store kiosk or by contacting your call

center. You can also provide product recommendations

based on the items the gift registrant has chosen to help

ease the purchaser’s decision-making process. Any

existing in-store services, such as location services,

inventory services, can be included to add extra level

of personalization for gift shopping. In addition, new

services can be added without completely re-designing

the business process. For example, viewing product

reviews and gathering consumer feedbacks on a

product helps buyer to decide buying a particular

product.

3. A SOA Architecture for Channel

Integration

Instead of using printed gift registry list, in-store

customers can use portable scanners to identify items

for their registries. All modifications or purchases to

the list—whether they are made on-line, over the

phone, or in the store—are updated in real time to

ensure that the gift registry status information is

accurate. While portable scanner can efficiently

eliminate the problem of duplicated gifts, it does not

provide rich interactive information such as product

information, location information, related product

information, and promotion offers. A new type of

device called in-store shopping buddy, using wireless

technology and a LCD display screen, has been used by

some retail stores to improve customers’ in-store

shopping experience [8].

The main challenge in building a retail multi-

channel in-store commerce server lays not only in the

integration between a diverse set of end-user devices,

but also in the accessing and integrating a diverse set of

internal systems and technologies. A gift registry

process contains not only the gift registry services, but

also others services commonly found in a shopping

business process. For examples: the membership

service is to authenticate the ownership of the gift

registry. The catalog service helps registrants to select

desired gifts for the registry. The offer promotion

service uses an offer presentation rule engine to

provide cross-sale and up-sale offer information. The

detail of the offer presentation engine can be found in

[9]. The sales transaction service is used by gift givers

to purchase items. It also interacts with the gift registry

service to update the item status from, say, “still

needed” to “purchased” after successful check-out.

The location service is unique in the in-store commerce

3131

server. The service tracks shopper location and

provides gift location information for a shopper. The

overall SOA architecture of an in-store server and an

enterprise web-store server is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. SOA architecture of in-store and

enterprise servers.

4. Coordination of Registrants and Gift

Givers

Figures 4 and 5 show the view of a registry list by a

registrant and a gift giver, respectively. Obviously, a

registrant can add or remove gift items and specify

quantities. More importantly, a registrant needs to

establish the registry profile so that guests can find it

and contribute in time [10]. Both registrants and guests

need to be well informed about the status of each

specified gift. However, a gift registry list can have

more then one registrant viewing or updating it from

different channel at the same time. For example, a

bride may be at a physical store using the personal

shopping device to scan items into the wedding

registry, while the groom may be at home accessing the

web channel and viewing the same gift registry. The

collaboration system should guard against these actions

performed on the same item from both parties at the

same time. Types of coordination of registrants and

guests are discussed in detail in this section.

Figure 4. Gift registry list as seen by the registrant.

Figure 5. Gift registry list as seen by a gift giver.

We have categorized the possible Gift Registry

operation into three scenarios, namely, “Registrant vs.

Co-Registrant”, “Gift Giver vs. Gift Giver” and “Gift

Giver vs. Registrants”.

Registrant vs. Co-Registrant

There are three possible actions: “add item”,

“remove item” and “change item quantity”. The “add

item” action may fail if the item already exists in the

registry. The “remove item” action may fail if no such

item exists in the registry or if the item has been

purchased.

For the “change item quantity” action, the request

will carry the original quantity and the desired new

quantity, if the original quantity does not match the

quantity value in the gift registry server, the request

fails. Error! Reference source not found.6 shows the

scenario of registrant and co-registrant trying to change

the quantity of an item simultaneously. The problem

gets more complicated if the physical store connection

3232

to the web-store gift registry server is temporarily

disconnected. Policies can be in place to allow the in-

store shopper to continue to edit the gift registry.

Synchronization should take place once the connection

is restored. If there is any discrepancy between the in-

store copy and the enterprise web-store copy,

registrants will be notified of the discrepancy and

registrants can take proper action.

Registrant

Login

Co-RegistrantIn-Store

Gift Registry

Web-StoreGift Registry

Request gift list

Login

Receive gift list

Choose item X

G ift list

Gift list

Choose item X

Change item X quantity(from a to c)

Request gift list

Quantity change fails,

Refresh withcurrent quantity (b)

Quantity succeeds

Change item X

Quantity (from a to b )

Figure 6. An example of Registrant vs. Co-

Registrant

Gift Giver vs. Gift Giver

When a gift giver scans a gift item to buy, the “reserve

an item” request is send to the enterprise web-store

server. This request may fail if the item has been

reserved by another gift giver. This may happen since

there is no automatic refresh event sent by the

enterprise server when the main list is updated. A gift

giver might not be aware that the main list has been

changed until he/she tries to reserve an item. An event

triggering service may be added if maintaining a

consistent view of the gift registry list through out all

the channels is needed. An item once scanned will

remain in the “Reserved” state before being checked

out. Removing an item from the shopping cart will

change the item’s status from “Reserved” to

“Available”. Figure 7 shows the scenario of two gift

givers trying to purchase the same item from different

channels.

Loyalty

Customer 1

Login

Loyalty

Customer 2

In-Store

Gift Registry

Web-Store

Gift Registry

Get gift list Login

Receive gift list

In-Store

Gift Registry

Reserve Item “X”

Receive gift listStore filtered Gift

Lists

Reservation done,

Updates “X” and

all gift items’ status

Store filtered gift

lists Reserve Item “X”

Checkout

Mark Item as

purchased Show gift list

Show gift list

Refresh request

Return all gift item’s

latest statuses

Show gift

list

Reservation failed,

Return all gift items’

latest statuses

Show gift

list

Get gift list

Figure 7. An example of two competing Gift Givers.

Registrant vs. Gift Givers

There are three possible “remove an item” scenarios

between a registrant and a gift giver. In the first

scenario, the gift giver may be notified by a pop-up

window. This requires the event triggering mechanism

from the enterprise server to the local server. In the

second scenario, the “remove an item” request may fail

if the item has been reserved. The gift giver can

proceed to purchase the item without knowing the

registrant’s intention. The sequence diagram for this

scenario is shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. An example of Registrant vs. Gift Giver.

In the third and last scenario, the gift giver will be

notified by the pending remove request during check

out. This scenario is undesirable since the gift giver

will need to find an alternate gift and the registrant also

needs to be notified of the result of the pending remove

request. All three scenarios can be implemented by

3333

adding an event triggering mechanism and should be

decided by the enterprise gift registry policies.

5. Concluding Remarks

Gift registry application has been a popular e-

commerce business model beyond the usual on-line

catalog shopping. The multi-channel gift registry

brings a brand new experience to customers and strict

requirements to retailers to renovate IT infrastructure

configurations to unify all sales channels. This paper

reports an implementation with a set of gift registry

services to handle possible interactions between user

roles in different channels as an industry experience.

However, gift registry is just one collaborative

shopping paradigm over multiple channels. Many

other types are open for future investigation. Using the

business process model-driven approach and service-

oriented architecture, this implementation is flexible to

accommodate new shopping paradigms, with asset

reuse for future on-demand commerce solutions.

6. References [1] Tamara Mendelsohn, “The Inevitable Convergence Of

Retail Channels”, Forrester Research, May 17, 2007

[2] A. Johnson, “The US consumer 2004: multichannel and

in-store technology”, Forrester Research: Data Overview –

Sept. 20, 2004

[3] G. Roussos, M. Pryzbliski, P. Kourouthanasis, G.

Kalpogiannis, E. Gryazin and Giaglis, “Systems Architecture

for Pervasive Retail”, Proc. of the 2003 ACM Symposium on

Applied Computing, Melbourne, Florida, 2003, pp. 631-636.

[4] G. Roussos, L. Koukara, P. Kourouthanasis, J. Tuominen,

O. Seppa1a, G. Giaglis and J. Frissaer, “A case study in

pervasive retail,” Proc. ACM Mobi1e Commerce 2002,

pp.100-105.

[5] P. Kourouthanassis and G. Roussos, "Developing

consumer-friendly pervasive retail systems", IEEE Pervasive

Computing, 2003, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 32-39. “RF for Retail”,

White paper by Symbol Technologies,

http://www.ara.com.au/ e_commerce/RetailMobility.pdf

[6] Best Practive for Using WebSphere Business Modeler

and Monitor, IBM Redbook Paper, 1006

[7] Providing a multichannel gift-center solution that can

help increase customer acquisition, retention and wallet

share, IBM Gift Center for WebSphere Commerce, IBM

White paper, 2006

[8] Smart Store: Enhancing the retail customer’s shopping

experience, IBM executive Technology report. IBM Business

Consulting Services, 2003.

[9] Y-H Liu, J-S Yih, T. Chieu, “A Personalized Offer

Presentation Scheme for Retail In-Store Application,” EC-

Web 2004: Zaragoza, Spain.

[10] “Rules of Gift Giving” (based on a survey conducted by

The Knot and Kohl’s Bridal Aisle). 2005.

http:www.kohlscorporation.com/ecom/giftregistry/giftgivingr

ules.htm

[11] Gartner Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce, Feb. 2007.

3434